Estimation of an Observation Satellite’s Attitude Using Multimodal Pushbroom Cameras

Pushbroom cameras are widely used for earth observation applications. This sensor acquires 1D images over time and uses the straight motion of the satellite to sweep out a region of space and build a 2D image. The stability of the satellite is critical during the pushbroom acquisition process. Therefore its attitude is assumed to be constant over time. However, the recent manufacture of smaller and lighter satellites to reduce launching cost has weakened this assumption. Small oscillations of the satellite’s attitude can result in noticeable warps in images, and geolocation information is lost as the satellite does not capture what it ought to. Current solutions use inertial sensors to control the attitude and correct the images, but they are costly and of limited precision. As the warped images do contain information about attitude variations, we suggest using image registration to estimate them. We exploit the geometry of the focal plane and the stationary nature of the disturbances to recover undistorted images. We embed the estimation in a Bayesian framework where image registration, a prior on attitude variations and a radiometric correction model are fused to retrieve the motion of the satellite. We illustrate the performance of our algorithm on four satellite datasets.